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Maybe each of my days are an attempt to live a life as cool as Ferris Bueler. Every day is an opportunity to experience a perfect “day off.”

Today Joe and I went to a Yankees game up in the Bronx. Our seats were really good, in the shade just behind home plate. New Yorkers hold sacred a Yankee game. To hear their cheers, witness their rituals, and chant with them–what an experience. I felt kind of bad, being from Atlanta and experiencing some whipping from NY over the years.

After the game Joe and I caught the D train for a quick shot to St. Paul’s for Mass. It’s been a while since I’ve been to Mass there. The distinct aroma of the varnished wood pews, polished marble columns, and painted frescoes brought good memories of earlier this summer, when that church was my refuge from loneliness, fear, and heartbreak.

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In New Orleans, my friend Jamie said that some situations are so perfect, you can hear God saying things like, “white doves enter stage left, fly over palm trees towards setting sun.” Tonight could very well have been my perfect last night in Harlem.

Monday we primered the walls white. Tuesday I painted the outlines and the kids filled in the colors on the right side of gate. Wednesday the kids painted the left side of the gate. So all the colors are there, and tonight was the night for adding details and cleaning up some lines. Our drop cloth looks like a bootleg Jackson Pollock canvas. The rims of the near-empty buckets are clogged with booger paint, the foam brushes torn and floppy, barely clinging to the wooden handle. I made due with the tools and materials.

The mural has become quite the center of attention on the block. Everyone and their landlord has come by, admired our work, and congratulated us for our ambition. Kids on bikes and scooters pulled up every few minutes to ask a marathon of questions. They pointed out to their friends all the parts they had done. Their friends would get jealous and insist that I hand them the brush. lol. I had to keep chasing these boys off the sidewalk because their football kept rolling into my buckets.

Dusk darkened to night, but the block showed no sign of slowing down. The thugs at the corner threw dice for money a few feet from our mural. I would audit their game to figure out how it was played. There was a fourteen-year-old boy who ruled the whole scene, bullying kids twice his age and size. I didn’t know if I wanted to kick his butt or run from him. He “boogies.” When you boogie, you and a friend circulate from subway car to the next, dancing and entertaining for a couple minutes. Then they pass their Yankees hat for donations and move on to the next car. This kid made $200 today and was trying to double it by hustling on the corner.

Cars are furniture. Here there are no yards, just a street lined with cars. If the stoop is filled, cars are the only thing left to sit on. It still cracks me up seeing a dozen kids park their butts on a car that isn’t theirs. They’ll prop their bikes against the fender, put their Chinese food carry-out on the trunk. The old Buick made for pretty good stadium seating while I painted.

Across the street Master had his SUV doors swung open, letting the block dance and strut to the rap anthems. Every half-hour I would cross the street to join his crew for some advice and a drink. Varessa and Joi soon joined us, and so did Tory and his lady friend. It is so funny to see three hipster white kids hanging out with Harlem natives. You just have to giggle at the scene. Some kids would be doing the “Harlem shake” and I would have to show ‘em up. Everyone would laugh, clap, and holler at the twenty-two year old white boy battling young thugs in a shake off. lol.

So this is it–this is the last night in my apartment in Harlem, USA. This has been a phenomenal cultural, spiritual, and social experience. I think a pivotal part of my New York experience was learning to hang out and appreciate Harlem, not just sleep here. I will never run out of stories about living in Harlem. People like Masta, Varessa, Toni, Joi, Paul, Omar, Genera…these people will be etched in my memory forever. This is my neighborhood, and I am going to miss my neighbors.

After brainstorming with the neighborhood, we finalized the concept: a scene of the kids from the street, playing and hanging out, talking about their future.

I got up this morning, gathered a few kids, and told them our plan. We are going to paint the coolest mural in Harlem. And we are going to work together and it’s going to be a lot of fun. We had buckets of black and white, and a bucket of each primary color. Once one kid was painting, every building emptied into the street to help. Last night, lying in bed, I wouldn’t imagine my greatest difficulty today would be how to turn away help.

Kids love to paint, but they don’t like painting in the lines. God love ‘em, this is going to be a long week.

The community is so amped! I mean, when people see others making their community a better place, they aren’t afraid to tell you that you are doing a good job. I’ve met dozens of new kids and even more adults today. Man, it is looking good! I’m going to have to post the pictures on this page.

This evening Pat and I rollerbladed down the riverside. It was the perfect time of the day. The sun had set and everything but the sky and mirroring water seemed to turn a charcoal gray. There is such a peace at that time of the day. Maybe it is a sense of helplessness, a sense of humility that settles on us, knowing that we can’t keep the sun from rising or setting. Maybe it is the reality that the day has come and gone, whether we like it or not.

We ate dinner at on odd spot. It is like some sort of European ruins by the water. There were stone walls, stairs, arches, and fountains… Pat told me that this was a spot caught on the first “Real World, New York.” Julie spent the night here with homeless people. Ten years ago, this was a “Reagan Bill,” a village of government tents for the homeless of New York. Now it is a hip hang out for Upper Westside yuppies. It was so surreal.

Back at the house, Pat slid down the wall to sit down, and sliced his finger on a piece of glass. I recalled my Boy Scout knowledge and gave him a sock to apply direct pressure. After an hour, he insisted we go to the hospital to get stitches. The ER seemed to be entertained by “that kid from the Real World” and his bleeding friend. Pat’s hand stopped bleeding and we went home before Pat could sign in. I made him pay for the cab.

This morning a Life Teen youth minister from Philadelphia came to my apartment to film a video for his teens. After he shot the video, he dug into his back pocket to pull out some money for my time. I couldn’t stand the thought of taking his money, it was just an hour of my time.

(…but, there is that wall on the street. That old beat up mural painted a decade ago. Now it’s battered and vandalized…)

“If you want to make a donation to painting the mural, I would accept that.” So I knew I had to repaint the mural, I had this guy’s money now. lol. Okay, so I’ve passed this wall every day for several months. Beneath the scrawled graffiti and dirt you can read some anti-drug slogans from the kids in the community. But it is almost like they don’t mean it anymore, that the wear and tear has erased those words from the wall and from the minds of the kids.

That was this morning. Now there is this newly white wall–a blank canvas–and I don’t know what I am going to do. What am I doing? lol. I am not from here, I don’t know who owns the wall, I don’t have any more paint, I don’t know what I am going to paint!

Before I go to bed in a couple hours, I will have a design. I will get up tomorrow and sketch it on the wall. We should be well on our way by tomorrow night. Ah man, it is supposed to rain all week. This is an act of faith. This is going to be fun.

There are those times when music seems to perfectly narrate my life at that moment. Listening to the Smashing Pumpkins’ “Landslide” as I ran five miles before school..or the Fugees’ “No Woman No Cry” as my friends and I swung off the cliffs into the lake…or Rob Zombies’ “More Human than Human” as I raced through Atlanta in my Civic.

This evening I pulled on my rollerblades and slipped in the Pete Yorn CD. Over the next hour, the music perfectly fit the emotions flickering inside of me. His music is so…so smooth, slightly melancholy, insightful, and cuddly. I road from 151st Street down to 110th, then through Central Park. I carved my way on the paths under the trees, around the lake, past the green fields mottled with people hiding from the skyscrapers. I was in my own little world, my music and my speed was my mask that let me stay away from those around me.

Central Park is such a remedy for New York. When the wailing sirens, honking taxis, and banging subways become too much, you run into the woods, hands clasped over your ears like a child. I’ve never seen anything like it. It is almost a sacred place. People live and die by this park.

My feet were hot and blistered, so I pulled off my skates at the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Wow! This place is so huge that you almost need a three-day pass to absorb it all. The Egyptian collection alone is a museum within itself. I felt like Indiana Jones, passing from one section to the next, my own little adventure through ancient worlds. The atrium (I guess you would call it) is so expansive and expensive feeling. The musicians upstairs pulled their bows across their strings, saturating the air with timeless music. This place is cool.

(You know, I wasn’t sure if I liked walking around the museum alone or not. I enjoyed going at my own pace, but I wonder if I would enjoy it more with some one else. )

Pat, Tory, and I threw a party tonight at our apartment. Tory is moving back to Seattle, Pat is having a birthday and is going to Africa for a little bit, and I am moving to Phoenix. Our pad looked so clean and pimped out, begging for people to celebrate. The place quickly filled up with friends from around the city. The diversity of people there boggled my mind. It was like our own little Real World house brimming with eccentric personalities from unique backgrounds–New York is just like that. The life of the party was Master (Masta), the patriarch of the block. He is a Harlem native beyond belief!

I remember my first night in Harlem. I was tired, scared, and thinking, “What the hell am I doing here?” There we were, the three roomies: Tory, Pat, and me. Three white boys in Harlem. lol!

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(ah…she is so…so–I love her so much. It hurts that we can’t be together, that we weren’t meant to be together, that these emotions and feelings can’t be solidified with wedding vows. Am I young and confused? What aren’t we, why are we?)

Going away.

Pat and I weaved in and out of the oncoming herd of taxis. He is a lot better at rollerblading than I am, but I still managed to pull myself out of some awkward situations. Madison Avenue is such a New York experience; looking down the street, the towering skyscrapers disappear into gray of dusk.

In between the honks and screeching buses, I told Pat about my date this afternoon. Meredith knew we were going to the park, but she wasn’t expecting the picnic I had made. Times like this afternoon make me hurt that we aren’t meant to be together, because sometimes it sure seems like it.

We met Joe (RW Miami) in SoHo for an off-Broadway show called Six Goumbas and a Wannabe, a story about a reunion of seven Brooklyn kids after years apart. Joe knew one of the actors because they are from the same neighborhood. Though I don’t remember which character he is, I know he is also on The Sopranos. It’s cool b/c they knew each other before they “made it” on TV. The show was great. But, had I watched this show five months ago, I wouldn’t have gotten any of it. Now that I live in New York, I laughed with the rest of them. It was kind of like a redneck joke, you really don’t understand it until you live around rednecks.

Joe went back home and Pat and I put on our rollerblades. I was in the fifth grade, visiting my uncle in Florida, when I first heard of rollerblades. I thought the whole thing was cool, but I didn’t get them b/c I figured the trend was well along and I would look dumb getting into it too late. (Oh…the mind of a fifth grader.) Here I am, deciding I’ve wasted ten years of fun.

We started out way down at the bottom of the island, and by 4:30 AM we were up at 151st. They say New York is “the city that never sleeps,” but it does. By one in the morning on a weeknight, the city is well into its slumber. It was like we had the whole city to explore, contending only with a few taxis and some eccentric night owls.

Pat is such an awesome guy. He is one of those people that you immediately feel comfortable talking with. Even after spending most of the day together, we still eagerly chatted as we rolled through the city.

It’s almost dawn, my legs are aching, and my eyelids are falling. Goodnight.